Chapter Thirty-Five

The healer’s tent exploded into a chaos of blood and gore as the knights and hunters returned. The freneticism of stopping bleeding, stitching wounds, and applying potions kept me too busy to think, but I slowly began to piece together a story of what had befallen them. The creature had possessed a tail to accompany the pinchers that Val had mimed for me that morning, and that tail had been armed with some type of stinger.

The injuries varied from burns from the poison of the stinger to cuts, and bruises from being knocked aside in the swing of its great tail. The burn injuries were most serious, but still relatively minor, the knights and hunters having been too many, too small, and too quick for the creature to stab effectively.

Most of the knights and hunters had been covered by their leather or metal armor. The first step was to strip that from them without coming into contact with the poison or getting more upon the injured person. Hands, necks, and faces were the most common inj